Joanna Dobson: A Decade in Altai
Russian Editors James Wilson and Nadya Miryanova, and Co-Editor-in-Chief Liv Bonsall speak to Cambridge graduate Joanna Dobson about her experience in the extreme south of Siberia, the art of ‘transcreation’ and her current writing project, ‘A Decade in Altai’.
‘This is my current vision board.’ A Zoom call with Joanna Dobson is anything but static. Laptop in hand, she guides us along the walls of photographs which surround her in her day-to-day life. ‘There are some Scythian images’, she explains pointing to a tiger with a ‘flaming fur’ pattern, and a deer with a long, elegant snout and antlers running in recurring waves behind the head. Five years after her return to the UK, her desire to accurately communicate the essence of the Altaian mindset to us is reflected in these visual glimpses of inspiration. ‘Indigenous spiritual values become most accessible when lived’, she explains - the vitality of the images which surround her offer us a small window into these values, but it is Dobson’s dedication to explaining them in detail, through nuanced observations, that proves her deep understanding of Altai culture.
But let’s rewind a little. Where is the Altai Republic? A federal republic of Russia, the mountainous region is located in the South of Western Siberia. Little would Dobson know that the language skills she acquired at university would prove to be crucial to her ten-year experience there. ‘When I left Cambridge, I wasn't very confident in my language abilities. I was fairly certain that whatever I did in my career it would have nothing to do with anything that required linguistic skill’. Graduating with a degree in German and ab-initio Russian, she was sure that she would then move into a different field. ‘The one thing I would never be was a translator. However, looking back, I am extremely grateful for my Cambridge education, and particularly for the nourishing input of Natasha Franklin because without knowledge of the Russian language, it would have been impossible for me to live and work in the Altai Republic as I did’.
Dobson interpreting at Kalbak Tash rock art sanctuary. Credit: Jodi Frediani, photographer.
Fast-forward 25 years, and Dobson reminisces on her years working as a translator and interpreter with the Altai people. How could this happen? ‘It came about really by just being in the right place at the right time’. Initially, Dobson was teaching English in a private language school, and perusing exhibitions at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences in her spare time.
‘I made friends with the curator, and she asked me if I would like to be one of the proofreaders on the journal that they produce in Russian and English. So I did that for about 10 years. Then, in 2004 or 2005, I started doing some volunteer translation work with local nature parks. And at that time, in the Altai Republic, nature parks were very new and they were an experiment on behalf of the indigenous population to find some form of land management, which would fill the abyss that was left after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. And so the directors of four Altai nature parks asked if I would be their translator. I explained to them that I had not really had any training as a translator, and wasn't sure I'd be very good at it. And they said, “well, we've not had any training about how to be directors of nature parks. We're just working it out as we go along!”. But they wanted to have somebody who was living there and would be regularly informed of what they were trying to achieve. So that's how the translation work started’.
In 2005 Dobson moved to the Karakol Valley in the heart of the Altai Republic. Lying across both sides of the Karakol river, the Karakol Valley measures 22 km by 3 km, and sits at an altitude of 900-950 above sea level between taiga-covered mountain ranges. The valley is cut off to the west by the Terektinsky ridge, and is mostly inhabited by the Altai Kijhi. A site of human settlement for thousands of years, the valley is home to more than 5000 Karakol, Scythian, and Turkic burial mounds, or kurgans. When Dobson thinks back to the valley, she thinks of the Bashadar tiger, the ‘flaming fur’ image on display in her home today. The image was originally carved into a wooden sarcophagus, now housed in the Hermitage Museum as an example of Scynthian craftsmanship. It was excavated from the famous Bashadar kurgan complex at the centre of the valley beneath the peaks of Uch Enmek; Dobson could see the mounds from the edge of the village.
The details of the Bashadar tiger design, originally carved into the wooden sarcophagus lid. Credit: Vega Boney-Hundal, illustrator.
Dobson explains that moving there ‘wasn't an easy thing to do, because aside from the indigenous people, very few Russians had ever lived in that community, and certainly no Westerner had ever lived there’. Life in the Karakol valley couldn’t differ more from what she, or we, are used to. ‘In the winter, most of the day evolved around being quite disciplined about doing certain things at certain times, just so there was enough heat in the building. So I would get up in the morning, open the door, go to the loo. And once I'd opened the door, I’d try to get everything outside that needed to go outside, and everything inside that needed to come inside, so I had the door open for as minimum a period of time as possible.
‘I’d light the fire and go outside to get water, which would involve going down a bank, walking over the ice, and only walking out as far as somebody would have laid a wooden stick on the ground, to say where it was safe to walk out. I’d get an axe, hack through to renew the ice hole, put my rope and my bucket into the water, get my water and go back inside. So the day was a lot to do with just the menial tasks of everyday life’.
But aside from menial everyday tasks, life in the Karakol valley presented a far more profound challenge for Dobson to adapt to. The Altai Kijhi, Dobson stresses, have a very different relationship to the land around them, one that incorporates the landscape into their spiritual framework, and that necessitates particular relationships to the surrounding countryside. ‘Traditional forms of land use prevail, which centre on the belief that the land is sacred and cannot be divided or privately owned. Taking water from the river, for example, was limited to certain times of day and periods of the lunar cycle. There was an emphasis on controlling one’s thoughts and emotions - or “keeping them white (clean, positive)” - when taking water from a river or crossing a water source, “because water has memory and must be kept pure”. In 5 years living in the valley, I never once took anything to the water’s edge to wash it (hair, cooking utensils, rugs when spring cleaning). I cannot imagine that I could have lived in the valley for more than a few days, if I had not observed these customs.
‘I remember when it was mid-winter and the glacial waters were becoming increasingly sparse. The water level in the river dropped to such an extent that when we let our buckets down the ice-hole, they hit the river bed before they drew water. Then, one day, there was no water flow at all. My neighbour and I climbed down through the ice-hold into the cavern below the icy river roof and spent several hours removing stones from the gully in the river bed where the little stream had flowed. However strange it might sound, I distinctly remember thinking that our access to water could depend on the position of a single stone and that it was the community’s spiritual lifeway, customs, and blessings as much as gravity that kept the water flowing’. According to Dobson, this particular relationship to nature is why life in the Altai is so unique: ‘the Karakol valley is a rare example of an integrated spiritual and cultural landscape’.
In summer, however, Dobson’s day-to-day responsibilities changed. ‘There'd be a lot of people passing through. I'd be trekking a lot of the summer, interpreting for different groups who were coming through, who might be ecologists on an expedition, or an American group of people on a pilgrimage, maybe a film crew. So there was a lot of variety, a lot of movement in the summer’.
The influx of tourists in summer, both of Westerners and, increasingly, of Russians, poses both one of the most important challenges and opportunities for the Altai people. The last 15 years have seen an explosion in the numbers of tourists visiting the Altai, many of whom lack knowledge of the Altai’s spiritual and cultural customs, and Dobson explains the crux of the issue as ‘the extent to which the Altai people could collaborate with these other professionals coming into the region and maintain their daily customs, which were intrinsic to their spiritual culture. But I think once visitors go beyond a certain number threshold, it becomes almost impossible to manage that. So the challenge was on the one hand economic, but it was also about cultural survival’.
So when Dobson became involved in the Altai-Sayan United Nations Development Project, a multi-million pound initiative to further develop the network of protected areas across the Altai-Sayan biogeographic region, within which the Altai Republic lies, it was essential that local people were driving the project. ‘It was a group of indigenous leaders who had come up with the idea to create nature parks, because it gave them a legal structure within which they could manage the land, whilst taking account of traditional herding practices and preserving their spiritual culture. So the park directors were local people who were totally integrated in the herding communities. Part of the reason why nature parks were set up was so that the local people would have a method or some kind of control over how tourism would be managed in the areas of which they had been the guardians for generations.. And so it offered them a means of economic development’.
But despite the project’s best efforts to respect the autonomy of local peoples, Dobson perceived many of the same issues that often define interactions between international organisations and indigenous cultures: ‘the clash there was, again, to what extent can the value system of the local people be allowed to function within what is not an indigenous structure?’ Dobson therefore reflects on the influence of her own presence in the Altai, and is careful to point out the problematic aspects of relationships between Altaian locals and outsiders. But she identifies one clear way in which she positively impacted on the region: ‘I think the reason I aligned myself with the goals of the local parks is because translators can assist in the communication of cultural values. And I think that if we really want to maximise the knowledge that different cultures have around the world, we need to be able to understand what people's priorities are, understand their worldview’.
But Dobson is optimistic for the future: ‘It's tempting to talk about indigenous cultures as if they are inevitably dying out. But my experience of the Altai culture is that it's actually extremely resilient, and has all sorts of adaptive forms or social structures, which, if given time, if given support, actually adapt really well’.
Dobson interpreting for Toby Mcleod’s film crew - that produced Standing on Sacred Ground - at the Bashadar kurgan complex in the Karakol Valley.
In fact, Dobson has spent the last 4 years documenting her travels and experience of the Altai culture through her current writing project, A Decade in Altai. We ask her about the inspiration behind it. ‘What I’m trying to do is create an experience where the reader can take the philosophical journey I took into a different worldview. I’m trying to evoke a sense of community and connection with the environment. In other literature, this would probably be referred to as “shamanic time”’ - an ancestral experience with the landscape’.
‘To convey their intimate connection with the landscape, the Altai people used ecological terminology such as metaphors to express the inner spiritual values towards the land’, Dobson continues, ‘In every area that I interpreted - be it for archaeologists, conservationists, economists, scientists - they seemed to take a section of the lives of the Altai population and study it. However, it’s equally important to focus on what the indigenous people were trying to say and how they expressed it. Science tends to study components of a cultural landscape separately, and so it can be easy to lose a sense of the connections between different areas of study, for example “archaeology”, “wildlife biology”, “ethnology”. In the Altai worldview, these components of the cultural landscape are always seen as part of the whole wider ecosystem. All conservation and cultural preservation practices, be they with regard to the guardianship of ritual sites, ancient monuments, natural resources or flora and fauna, are underpinned by a single value system that is upheld by the community. These values are rooted in the indigenous epistemology. And so customs and traditions that might appear strange to an outsider, or indeed, appear to have no direct relevance to a conservation practice, can be understood when embracing that epistemology. Its effectiveness and inner workings are quite clearly apparent when lived. This is why I think translators have a crucial role to play. Through language we can help build understanding of worldviews, which hopefully will open up greater access to the local knowledge about the connections between livelihoods, cultures and nature’.
Dobson felt that the indigenous population was very quick to adapt to the vocabulary and key concepts residing within Western conservation methods, but noticed that there was little exploration by way of their expression and worldview. Motivated by a sense of missed opportunity, Dobson seeks to share Altai’s fascinating spiritual culture in her memoir.
She takes us through her writing process: ‘I’m working from memory quite a lot and that’s hard work, it takes a lot of concentration. Often, I’ll find myself starting a new chapter, and it takes me a couple of days of remembering and reading through my diaries to really feel that I’m there with enough detail to create a piece of writing about the experience’, she says. ‘It’s all about reliving it. I make connections I couldn’t have made at the time because now, it’s like looking down from a helicopter and seeing the different parts come together. I aim not to be too prescriptive about each new chapter- I tend to work chronologically and see what emerges’.
Dobson describes the different techniques brought into her writing, one of which includes making active use of visuals. ‘For every chapter, I’ve got a different image which comes from the landscape - each image introduces a new idea. Rock art, the Scythian burials, the Kurgans - all of these are numerous in the Altai region, as a lot of Scythian gold and feltwork was discovered in Altai; the works of twentieth century Altai artist Grigory Choros-Gurkin too, who made intricate ethnographic sketches of people, household utensils, tools and cultural monuments. There’s so much vibrancy within the landscapes, and this vitality seems to be what the indigenous people try to preserve as part of their conservation practices’.
A semi-wild herd of horses and Bronze Age standing stones at the foot of Mount Uch Enmek. Credit: Joanna Dobson.
Whilst working on her cultural narrative of Altai, Dobson remains an avid and acclaimed translator. What have been her favourite translation projects? She highlights a book she translated for an indigenous elder, Spiritual Wisdom from the Altai Mountains. ‘It was an absolute blessing to be working on the book’, she says. ‘It was the first one produced in the English language which was written by an Altai elder, so it felt like a real achievement. It was the first book I ever translated and although it took me ages, I loved it’. She also reveals her most recent, exciting project - an exhibition called the Gold of the Great Steppe, to be held at the Fitzwilliam Museum later this year. ‘I translated the articles by Kazakhstani archaeologists for the exhibition catalogue. I'm very excited to see the final result and how the public responds to it, because some of the imagery in the exhibition is similar to the type I’m using in my book to evoke issues surrounding indigenous relationships to the landscape’.
As the interview comes to its end, we feel enlightened, but still curious and eager to hear more about Dobson’s experiences. How to capture 10 years in one interview? Luckily, Dobson gives us a preview on her blog: http://altaipilgrim.com/en/. The CLC hopes to catch up with her again, when her book is published!